When I looked into it, it looks like GMO usage is growing globally.
”In 2023, GM technology was used in 76 countries and regions globally, and 206.3 million hectares of GM crops were planted in 27 countries and regions, representing 3.05% growth over the previous year. The planting area of GM crops has expanded 121-fold since 1996, and now accounts for approximately 13.38% of the total world farmland area (1,542 million hectares), with a total planting area exceeding 3.4 billion hectares.”
Thanks for commenting! Here’s some quick thoughts:
You’re right, 13% of farmland isn’t terrible! But it is also much less than they had the potential to be by now. Hopefully their growth will continue and in a few decades from now will be totally normalised. It took pastuerisation 60 years to get to 50% in the UK, and GMOs are at 13% after 30 years, so there’s time yet.
I shouldn’t have said “GMOs are a failure” but “the rollout of GMOs was a failure”, or “public acceptance of GMOs has been a failure”.
The fact that roughly half of all people think that GMOs are unsafe, and only 13% think they are safe, is a big part of what makes me think the GMO introduction was a failure.
The biggest failure has probably been in Africa, where there was lots of optimism that GM crops would enable small farmers to escape subsistance and accelerate the decline of poverty in the region, but except for South Africa, they’re barely grown on the continent today.
Also, I think the report you read includes GM cotton which is big in countries which ban GM food (e.g. India), as the concerns about health effects isn’t an issue there as they’re not eaten. I tried to exclude cotton in this post as I was focusing on GM food. I didn’t even try to untangle the GM crops that are used for animal feed, but I probably should have, as that’s also not very relevant for the GM acceptance of the public. I haven’t found a good number on it, but it seems like something like 2/3s of GM food we grow is fed to farm animals. As the post was using GM foods to understand “how does the public react to a new food technology?” for the purpose of thinking about cultivated meat, cotton and animal feed aren’t relevant.
There has been less uptake than may have been hoped for (and I think animal feed is a large percentage in US at least), but it still could be considered impressive growth since the 90′s.
It’s hard for me to know what the expected take off for this technology should have been and how it compares to similar things (slower than AI and smartphones but faster than tv’s and electricity, but these aren’t great reference classes).
I’m not as convinced by public opinion surveys as I imagine you’d probably get a similar proportion, if not higher, that think factory farming should be banned, which doesn’t stop them being used if people are prioritising price/taste/etc.
With reducing poverty, I think that is a whole host of other things that GMO’s wouldn’t have made much of a difference, even if they were 100% of food.
Growing GMOs is completely banned in the two most populous countries, China and India, along with Russia, and many more countries. In the EU there’s only one variety which is allowed to be grown (maize), and Spain is the country with the highest amount (20% of their maize production).
(Random fun fact, in Hungary they even introduced a clause in their constituition against growing GMOs for some reason)
To me it’s clear that something went badly wrong with the introdcution of the technology when so many countries have actively banned it.
(I’m talking about banning the growing of it, not the importing of it for animal feed, which many of these countries do)
I think China, in the last few years, has approved a few crops (from here, lots of interesting sections).
Maybe that’s why I’m more optimistic, despite the public being against GMOs (In 201846.7% of respondents had negative views of GMOs and14% viewed GMOs as a form of bioterrorism aimed at China), China leadership is still pushing ahead with them as it benefits the country.
Over time the countries that don’t use GMOs will either have to import, give larger subsidies to their farmers, or have people complain about why their food costs so much vs neighbouring countries.
I’m not so sure it has gone ‘badly’ wrong vs other tech innovations but I’m not as well read on tech adoption and the ups and downs of going from innovation to mass usage.
How is failure being defined here?
When I looked into it, it looks like GMO usage is growing globally.
”In 2023, GM technology was used in 76 countries and regions globally, and 206.3 million hectares of GM crops were planted in 27 countries and regions, representing 3.05% growth over the previous year. The planting area of GM crops has expanded 121-fold since 1996, and now accounts for approximately 13.38% of the total world farmland area (1,542 million hectares), with a total planting area exceeding 3.4 billion hectares.”
Thanks for commenting! Here’s some quick thoughts:
You’re right, 13% of farmland isn’t terrible! But it is also much less than they had the potential to be by now. Hopefully their growth will continue and in a few decades from now will be totally normalised. It took pastuerisation 60 years to get to 50% in the UK, and GMOs are at 13% after 30 years, so there’s time yet.
I shouldn’t have said “GMOs are a failure” but “the rollout of GMOs was a failure”, or “public acceptance of GMOs has been a failure”.
The fact that roughly half of all people think that GMOs are unsafe, and only 13% think they are safe, is a big part of what makes me think the GMO introduction was a failure.
The biggest failure has probably been in Africa, where there was lots of optimism that GM crops would enable small farmers to escape subsistance and accelerate the decline of poverty in the region, but except for South Africa, they’re barely grown on the continent today.
Also, I think the report you read includes GM cotton which is big in countries which ban GM food (e.g. India), as the concerns about health effects isn’t an issue there as they’re not eaten. I tried to exclude cotton in this post as I was focusing on GM food. I didn’t even try to untangle the GM crops that are used for animal feed, but I probably should have, as that’s also not very relevant for the GM acceptance of the public. I haven’t found a good number on it, but it seems like something like 2/3s of GM food we grow is fed to farm animals. As the post was using GM foods to understand “how does the public react to a new food technology?” for the purpose of thinking about cultivated meat, cotton and animal feed aren’t relevant.
There has been less uptake than may have been hoped for (and I think animal feed is a large percentage in US at least), but it still could be considered impressive growth since the 90′s.
It’s hard for me to know what the expected take off for this technology should have been and how it compares to similar things (slower than AI and smartphones but faster than tv’s and electricity, but these aren’t great reference classes).
I’m not as convinced by public opinion surveys as I imagine you’d probably get a similar proportion, if not higher, that think factory farming should be banned, which doesn’t stop them being used if people are prioritising price/taste/etc.
With reducing poverty, I think that is a whole host of other things that GMO’s wouldn’t have made much of a difference, even if they were 100% of food.
Growing GMOs is completely banned in the two most populous countries, China and India, along with Russia, and many more countries. In the EU there’s only one variety which is allowed to be grown (maize), and Spain is the country with the highest amount (20% of their maize production).
(Random fun fact, in Hungary they even introduced a clause in their constituition against growing GMOs for some reason)
To me it’s clear that something went badly wrong with the introdcution of the technology when so many countries have actively banned it.
(I’m talking about banning the growing of it, not the importing of it for animal feed, which many of these countries do)
I think China, in the last few years, has approved a few crops (from here, lots of interesting sections).
Maybe that’s why I’m more optimistic, despite the public being against GMOs (In 2018 46.7% of respondents had negative views of GMOs and 14% viewed GMOs as a form of bioterrorism aimed at China), China leadership is still pushing ahead with them as it benefits the country.
Over time the countries that don’t use GMOs will either have to import, give larger subsidies to their farmers, or have people complain about why their food costs so much vs neighbouring countries.
I’m not so sure it has gone ‘badly’ wrong vs other tech innovations but I’m not as well read on tech adoption and the ups and downs of going from innovation to mass usage.